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Review: Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
Most of the cast is back again for the sophomore film. If you liked them before, you'll like them again, even if the boys voices have started changing and everyone is a little taller than they were last november.
The most substantial new character this time around is Gilderoy Lockhart played over the top and on the money by Kenneth Branagh. Alan Rickman's Severus Snape is practically a bit part here, but Richard Harris's Dumbledore gets a lot of scenes.
The general plot is as follows: Harry Returns to Hogwarts for his second year of wizarding school. He keeps getting signals and warnings that there will be trouble, but he ignores them and goes right on in anyway (Wouldn't you if you had his home life?). Anyway, at school students keep turning up petrified and the legend of the Chamber of Secrets revealed. Beyond that there's a little quidditch, rivalry with the other houses, and a mystery needing solving.
Generic, yes. But it's solidly produced and entertaining. Course I'm right in line for next year because I think the next 2 books are superior to the first 2.
As for the FX, I think they're a bit better than last time around. Especially during the Quidditch matches. The first films game sequences looked bad. Everything looked CG. This time around things are much more convincing. They also tackled Dobby the house elf and did him as a full CG character. The rendering on Dobby is just beautiful. Any still shot from his scenes would convince you that they just filmed a house elf right on set. And the fabric moves really well. Unfortunately the motion is all off. His weight feels wrong. His interaction with the set seems like he's a muppet. Hopefully they can nail him down before Goblet of Fire when there are many house elf scenes.
Anyway, I think this film is weaker than the first one, but I think that mostly this is because the book really doesn't add as much to the larger story. It's a solid movie and it stands well on its own feet, but knowing the bigger things yet to come gets me drooling for the next one. I'm hoping that handing the series off to someone besides Chris Columbus will give it a shot in the arm.
Personally I thought the movie had a weak plot. The book was ok but the movie just wasnt up to it.
ILM did the FX on this one. They broke the deal with the FX firm that did the first Harry Potter Movie.
Job well done ILM.
Spoiler Alert:
The monster in the Chamber of Secrets was the spider's "most feared enemy" or some such, so anytime it was encountered all the spiders in the area hightailed it out of there, and back to the dark forest. And they were there in the first place 'cause it was a big old castle, and spiders tend to move in. Maybe there are lots of apples on hand @ Hogwarts?
Actually most people CAN'T read. Look anywhere for literacy stats, it is disgusting.
Really? You must be talking about Saudi Arabia. Or "developed" parts of Africa where literacy reaches a whopping 50%.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107947.html
Because around here in the USA, functional literacy is probably as high as it is going to go... considering that some people can't be trained to tie their shoes if they don't want to.
SO... please refrain from the literacy rate argument. There are whole load of opportunities to read in the USA or most other highly industrialized nations. So for those that can't read (or refuse to sit still long enough to learn), there is either a reading disorder, or there is an issue somewhere that doesn't accurately reflect on our efforts. Don' tblame the system. It isn't perfect, but many people won't read for a thousand reasons other than the reading programs.
The Harry Potter books are elitist. You're worthless unless you have innate magical ability - just look at how people without these abilities are ridiculed time and time again.
No, the books are about how bad the people are who think that way. Harry Potter, the title character, does not think that way and again and again shows that the little people count too.
Wow. "Bit Part"? Are you actually familiar with "The Lord of the Rings"? It's the story of this guy Aragorn, the heir to a royal family that has lost it's thrown, and how he manages to recover it and win the woman he loves, against all conceivable odds. While his herculean efforts contribute to his victory, the key to success is his ability both to realize that he can't win without the help of God, and to act on that realization, leaving important aspects in God's hands.
Columbus has already bowed out. Alfonso Cuaron has signed on to direct the third adaptation: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Filming will begin sometime in the spring so you won't see this on the screen until sometime in 2004 (Relief or disappointment? You decide.)
It's been rumoured that Christopher Lee will step into the late Richard Harris's shoes as Dumbledore in the third film, although he has emphatically denied this. I'd prefer Ian McKellan myself.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
I'm sorry, but I feel that I must express my indignation at the technical inaccuracies in the film:
Anyone with half a brain knows that a Basilisk is a lizard, not a snake
Assuming that a Basilisk was a snake, blinding it would not affect it nearly as much as they show in the film, snakes can sense body heat
If Mrs. Norris did only see the basilisk's reflection in the water, then why was she affected at all, as anyone with even a basic grasp of biology should know that cats have mirrored eyes in order for them to see in the dark, so she wouldn't have been looking it directly in the eye anyway
I'm sure that there are more of them, but I wasn't paying that much attention
Also, why Mrs. Norris? Is she married?
Tolkien translates better to film because all his characters are so completely two-dimensional."
I disagree. Firstly the character depth in the LotR novels is amazing. Character complexity is what made reading LotR such an amazing experience for me, and conversely the complete absence of such themes from the film resulted in my absolute disappointment. I personally love the bond Gimli and Legolas form despite the greater hatred between the two dwarves and elves, and this was not hinted at even slightly in the film.
In regards to Harry Potter, the characters are complex but in a local scope, and this is what differentiates the two. Harry Potter is of the low fantasy genre and LotR is of the high fantasy genre. Typically low fantasy is fantasy of local scope and few central characters undergoing the one central plot together, whereas high fantasy consists of epic scope, multiple central characters with different (and usually inter-connected) plots, and elevated language.
J.K.Rowling and J.R.R.Tolkien are uncomparable.
Anyway, I think this film is weaker than the first one, but I think that mostly this is because the book really doesn't add as much to the larger story.
In this interview J K Rowling states that "Key things happen in book two. No one knows how important those things are... yet. There's a lot in there. And I know how difficult it was to get it all in there without drawing too much attention to the clues."
I felt vicariously embarassed when, leaving a different movie last night, my wife and I walked past a group of shabby comic-book-guy-like twentysomethings, sitting at the head of a very, very long Harry Potter line, playing Magic on the floor.
Oh man, my best friend, my brother, and I sat in line for Episode 1 for 18 hours.
We passed the time by playing Magic, and reading Dragon magazine.
My wife still talks about it, calling us "Neerrdd!" in her best Homer Simpson voice.
On topic: I didn't like this film nearly as much as the first one. I haven't read the books, and this felt more like a mystery caper, rather than the adventure of the first one. I'm pretty sure it's blasphemous to say this, but I thought the Quidditch match was unnecessarily long, and didn't move the story forward enough to justify its length.
As long as I'm going total Comic-book guy on this, does it bother anyone else that Harry Potter is supposed to be this great and powerful wizard, but his friends at Hogwarts always seem to be saving his ass?
Okay, I'm off to build a black and blue deck in preparation for the Two Towers opening. I know I have a Lord of the Pit around here somewhere...
It's Mandrake Root that kills with it's scream, not Nightshade.
Minor error, but your point is still valid. Children's stories ARE violent, and have terrifying things in them. You can't just have a story about generic "flat" villians all the time and have it become popular. Sometimes things go bad, and having such things in children's books is not necessarily a bad thing. Show children that evil DOES exist, but that it can be conquered by ordinary people. I would say that is the real message of the Harry Potter books/movies.
Erioll
What do the spiders have to do with the movie?
They're kind of a red herring. Seeing spiders fleeing the scenes of the attacks naturally raises the suspicion that they have something to do with what's going on. But as it turns out, the giant spider in the forest, Agragog, has nothing to do with anything. Spiders are deathly afraid of basilisks, and that's why they're seen running away whenever the basilisk struck.
What was up with the car? It was never cleared up. No motive, etc.
The car was enchanted. Enchanted things tend to have minds of their own at times. There's really not much more to it than that.
How about the water? Why does it keep showing up?
The basilisk travels through the water pipes. When it comes out, water gets all over everything.
The attacks seem a bit contrived. Contrived in the lethality.
The basilisk legend is actually real. A real legend, I mean. According to legend, a basilisk was a serpent whose gaze was lethal. The reflected gaze of the basilisk, though, paralyzes rather than killing.
Why? To keep the body count down, of course. In a book written primarily for 12-year-olds, it doesn't do to have characters dropping dead every few chapters.
Mee'sa Dobby? I guess he will be explained in the sequel, which I will probably need to see to resolve a few loose ends.
What loose ends are those? Dobby's a house-elf, and he knows that the Malfoy's have it in for Harry Potter. He tries to warn Harry, but in perversely roundabout ways. At the end of the story, Harry tricks Dobby's owner into giving Dobby a sock, which sets him free-- house-elves are enslaved (quite willingly) until their owners present them with clothes. Your average house-elf takes pride is his work, and would consider being given clothes a shameful failure. But Dobby, because he worked for the slimy and horrible Malfoy family, was happy to be dismissed.
I write in my journal
thats not true, have you ever read goblet of fire? there is a match in it where the seeker who cathes the snitch, actually loses the game for his team, it all matters on points, and the snithc just happens to be worth the most.
Peter Jackson is not going to do the next Harry Potter book. Alfonso Cuarón is going to direct "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". If you're not familiar with his work, his most recent film is "Y tu mamá también" (hardly a children's film, I know). But he did one of the best children's films of recent years "A Little Princess". Check it out and see if you don't agree.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb